In one of the many philosophically laden scenes in the “Matrix” movies, the character Neo is visiting the Oracle to determine whether he has what it takes to be a digital savior for all the mech-using humans currently living in what can only be described as a Titan-sized plumber’s paradise. Seriously, I love sci-fi movies, but the extent of the infrastructure often built in a ridiculously short time truly boggles the mind. No other movie (to my immediate recollection) comes close to “The Minority Report,” where, somehow, vast highways for single-person pod-cars have been built in less than a few decades from the current timeline. I understand that writers lean more toward fiction than science, and maybe putting in ridiculously large infrastructure projects is meant to inspire, but every time I see something like it on screen, I can’t help but laugh at how the show has gone from sci-fi to fantasy.

Back to the Oracle, though I promise the sojourn into a pet peeve concerning sci-fi shows is relevant (mostly), Neo is confronted with the Delphic declaration of “Know Thyself.” Carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple in Delphi, Greece, the statement can serve as a window into the degree of hubris each civilizational period has contained over the last couple of millennia. To what degree can anyone know themselves? Better, is there a singular self to know? And this will really bake your noodle: is there even a self to know at all?

In Francis Fukuyama’s book “Identity,” he notes a shift in contemporary thinking about the nature of the self, in which the distinction between inner and outer identity has led to a preoccupation with and ascendancy of the so-called inner or authentic self, beyond outward behavior and appearance.

“The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself. ” From: Fukuyama, Francis. “Identity.”

One of the results of this ascendency, as Fukuyama notes as well, is that previously the outer world served as a corrective to inner foolishness. We could imagine any number of things, but in their application, we would have to deal with the rest of reality — since we are not separate from it — which didn’t always follow our desires. Today, that relationship has flipped, such that the inner world has become the repository of truth — what is referred to as positional epistemology or “standpoint theory” — and if the outer world doesn’t conform, then it is at fault.

If you’ve heard the phrase “lived experience,” this is standpoint theory applied to individual psychology. If you’ve heard other phrases like “my truth,” or a preoccupation with supporting statements with “I feel,” this is positional epistemology at work. It is also the predominant tool for much of what passes for mental health therapy these days, alluded to in the declarations of finding the “real you” or “authentic self,” and in the advertising language of “you’re the expert of your own life.”

As one therapist expressed themselves:

This mentality is why people look for therapists who “look like me,” though the end result is that they are also looking for therapists who “think like me” and, most importantly, “validate me.” Carried to the logical — to many a bad word — conclusion, the standard for knowledge being put forward here makes it impossible for anyone to know anyone else. If a therapist has to “examine their own story” (as if there is only one), including delving into “all they had to hide of themselves” (another huge assumption, and if something is known it isn’t hidden, and if it’s hidden then the person doesn’t know it anyway), and only by doing this will they be able to “get” another person, then not only is the work never finished, if the client hasn’t done the same process, they won’t “get” the therapist either.

Note that in this description, the client doesn’t have to do any work, as it is assumed they already know themselves perfectly. They are, as it is often phrased, “experts” of themselves. Making this more confusing is that the statement about the therapist not understanding what meaning the client’s story has for them points to such meaning residing at an “unconscious" level. This means that the meaning is not accessible to the client either, despite later being assured that “you are the only one who knows about you.”

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Some may believe that I cherry-picked a singular comment to make my point, and I assure you, I did not. This is standard fare for therapeutic discourse. The inner world and the subjective have always been part of clinical work, which is why behaviorism sought to codify interventions and outcomes, moving away from the imaginative and non-falsifiable conjectures of psychoanalytic theory. That subjective report is still a part of psychological research is inevitable, since the current state of technology provides no way of mind-reading. The difficulties of subjective reporting, namely that people lie to themselves and to others, are inevitably prone to motivated reasoning, and are often answering different questions than what are actually asked, are all taken into consideration within research. That’s why you won’t, or rather you should never, see a definitive claim from science, particularly the social sciences, and instead every claim is probabilistically understood within narrow parameters.

Unfortunately, the incentives for elevating the subjective are strong, particularly when there’s a parallel push from the industry and elements of society as a whole to avoid discomfort, with validation replacing challenge. This is where you find the self-diagnosis movement in social media postings and increasingly from therapists as well. Here’s another statement from a therapist:

Again, I truly wish this were a minority opinion. Beyond the utter and complete lack of even an attempt at objectivity, this statement is coming from a group that mocks and belittles people from a different ideological bent, relying on their inner certainty when it comes to politically charged issues like COVID and vaccines. The lack of consistency isn’t just a feature of this thinking; it’s a central point. As is the case with so many statements of belief, they are not about articulating how the world works so much as signaling to others of like mind that they belong.

What is lost in all of this is any sense of humility, of a recognition that our biological evolution has only ever been focused on providing good-enough strategies for dealing with environmental constraints. The brain is no different than the rest of the body, despite how many people like to think the mind is somehow different, whether it be seen as the repository of the imago dei in Christian mythology, as possessing the power of context-free free will, or as the location of a singular transcendent self.

That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. (interview with Mitchell S. Green)

We are a species for which consciousness gives us the illusion of knowing about ourselves more than we actually do. Our rich and varied so-called “inner world” provides the enticements of certainty and emotional weight that Cypher from “The Matrix” is more than willing to step back into, despite doing so meaning he has to kill his friends.

Do any of you truly think you’ve stepped away from biology to not have this be an influence? We as a species have killed one another over religious mythology and imaginary lines drawn on maps. We get angry with people for behavior we imagine they’re doing, and judge ourselves for statements we imagine others are saying. We pretend with one another that the rules of driving are somehow intrinsic to the practice, and curb our behavior because of imagined social judgment about ignoring streetlights, even when nobody is coming from the other direction. We flip switches without — at least most of us — knowing how electricity and electrical engineering work, and push buttons to start cars without knowing how internal combustion engines and the electronics that are now ubiquitous function. We see a lack where there isn’t one and threats where there aren’t any. We mishear conversations all the time, and our memories are reconstructions rather than recollections.

Yet despite all this and so many other examples besides, when it comes to our day-to-day mental declarations, we go full speed ahead, heavily laden with hubris. And now we return to my amusing, to me, criticism of sci-fi movies, and the predilection they have for showcasing a world where the development of social cohesion to make massive infrastructure changes somehow overcame all the restrictions we know exist.

Dipping the toe into fantasy is a sign of that hubris in action, but we enjoy it because it provides hope for a future we’d like to step into. I can appreciate that desire. I’m hardly immune to it. Let’s just try not to mistake the desire for an outcome for what’s actually in front of us, and then not see all the work required to get to even an approximation of it. That’s true of community projects and our personal growth.

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Welcome to lesson six, the last module of the class on deconstruction and healing. Here, we focus on what it means to move forward with a full appreciation of all that it means to be human. Flexibility is key. It is the polar opposite of the rigidity of dogma. You are at the mercy of the constraints only of the natural world, and frankly, those limits keep getting pushed back as we collectively explore how nature contains far more than the imaginings of our ancestors.

This journey may mean struggling with disparate ideas. It may mean wrestling with contradictions and learning to be ok with “I don’t know” being a temporary answer. That’s the freedom that a humanistic appraisal of the human experience gives us. A freedom of responsibility, a freedom of connection, a freedom of discovery.

I’m glad you’ve been a part of this journey with me, and I hope you’ll continue learning and sharing with me.

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With every technological advance, there seems to be a not-small number of people who lament what it’s doing to our humanity, and make all manner of declarations to highlight what pieces of ourselves we’re leaving behind. In a few conversational threads on Threads (good marketing name that is), I’ve encountered various forms of how AI is “doing your thinking for you” or “don’t delegate your thinking to an AI.” A great many assumptions underlie these statements, not least the tacit one that AI possesses an agentic consciousness, but also how a thought or series of thoughts somehow become separated from you when using a tool.

The lament is also interesting due to the creeping advance of tech. Thing is, if you’ve ever used spell-check, asked a program to rewrite a sentence or paragraph for you, used Grammarly and other iterations of editing software, or used any amount of other editing software on photos to video, you’ve already “delegated” some of your thinking/activity. Now, before there are screams of how different all of those things are, let’s consider just how we’re delineating those differences.

1. Is it a matter of degree? At what point can you designate the dividing line between the use of a tool and “delegation”? When you open the program? Ask it a question? Is it just checking spelling, or does grammar cross the line? If you can see yourself writing the final realized statement, did you simply skip the line, so to speak? Perhaps with some humility, are you now performatively projecting that you’d have written it eventually anyway?

2. Is it a matter of intent? Are you attempting to imitate what you’re not able to do individually? Is the issue one of using a “cheat” to avoid the work or expenditure of resources elsewhere?

I will note that not a single one of the first set of questions, if you were to remove AI and put in a direct human being into the equation, would be answered as a negative. People have little problem engaging in conversations where there’s a breathing person in front of them, and taking advantage of the ubiquity of different perspectives to develop one’s own thinking. Yet, when it comes to an impersonal tool, somehow we’re losing ourselves.

Delegate your thinking? Are college and trade schools, attended in order to learn things you don’t know and can’t do individually, suddenly bad? What about studying in general? In a very real way, we’re piggybacking off the work of others to expand our perspective and understanding of one or another aspect of reality.

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The second set of questions likely delves deeper into the underlying concern (reminds me of how often people are asked one question and often are simply answering a different more basic one, thank you Kahneman), which is identifying actions associated with cheating or outcomes that are somehow “unearned.” Yes, there’s a very real concern about how AI has generally been trained without compensating the thinkers and artists for the work that, at least initially, AI was trained on. That’s a different concern than I’m focused on here, though I’ve yet to hear from anyone how, now that it’s done, such compensation is at all capable of being enumerated.

The focus here is more on the problem of “delegation.” I touched on this and other points in the previous article, but wanted to drill down a little further about the nature of self, in particular the notion that self is somehow singular and being obscured or denied by the use of technology.

The Robot Takeover

In the final scene of the movie “The Black Hole” released by Disney (I know, it shocks me too) in 1979, also the year I was born, and I’m sure there’s no coincidence, the villain, Dr. Reinhardt, seems to morph together with his robot creation as a testament to his will to live, yet trapped forever within an inhuman experience. Despite being at once utterly bizarre and truly disturbing to this young mind when I first saw the movie, I find that it represents a great deal of what people have in mind when they lament the use of AI in our lives.

There’s a visceral antipathy to the removal of one’s own flesh, as there rightly should be! Replacing it with a metallic substrate is the stuff of horror movies, or, if you’re looking to scar a generation of children, in a Superman movie.

Seriously, who thought kids needed to see that?

Regardless, the horror is real, and anything that bumps up against this removal of the flesh, in part or in whole, is going to have a deep emotional impact. A couple years ago, in an article from Psychology Today, The Illusion of the Modern Self, the author touched on issues related to the redefining of our selves through photo enhancements that, in comparison to what can be done now, seem utterly quaint.

The rise of platforms that can "redefine" our appearance based on existing photographs and transmute our visual self into an array of synthetic identities has ushered in a new existential predicament. This is not mere aesthetic play; this is an engineered mirage, an orchestrated fiction that supplants our empirical reality.

The entirety of this “problem” is the assumption that there’s a singular authentic self that must be kept sacred. “Synthetic identities” not only ignores that identity itself is a co-creative expressive label to show solidarity with an evolving social group, but it also ignores that there must be a person doing the synthesizing. Further, the “mere” in front of “aesthetic” doesn’t really get away from the glaring assumptions, as when do any of the things people have done throughout human history to change their appearance go from “mere” to “existential”? When the first person moved on from fig leaves to animal hides, did someone wonder who they were anymore? When hair and makeup styling went from looking “presentable” (a contextually-dependent word if I’ve ever heard one), to an artistic expression like at the Met Gala, was that an existential bridge too far? I mean, perhaps that’s a bad example, but still.

At no point in human history have we not sought to find new ways of personal expression, and it is through the various iterations of technological development that we have done so. Suddenly I’ve got clothing commercials in my head expressing variations on how the outfits make the person and not the reverse. We even use the metaphorical phrase “a new hat” or “the outfit doesn’t fit you” as an expression of the aesthetic being tied to identity.

But there’s just something scary about AI that goes beyond clothes, makeup, surgery, and implants.

We're buying into an ontological shift—a newly crafted existence made palpable by technology. It is akin to an AI-authored Rorschach Test where the inkblots are replaced by pixels, and the interpretation doesn't disclose your psyche but molds it.

And later…

As we adopt these templates for our offline selves, we may inadvertently contribute to a myth of individuality that is precarious at best. Instead of a spectrum of identities nurtured by authentic experiences and organic development, we are nudged toward ready-made personas, carefully curated by algorithms that have mapped the zeitgeist down to the last pixel.

Here, I think, is where we get to the meat of the matter, this assumption that there’s something indelibly magical about the individual person. Call it a broader version of the “Noble Savage” stereotype, that absurd attempt at lionizing native populations by effectively portraying them in a child-like way. The broader version paints humanity as some pure vessel of creativity, brought low by the venal influences of technology. It’s a Romantic myth, and it’s little wonder such is expressed loudly today with the elevation of the subjective over any attempt at critical appraisal, when truth is contingent upon belonging to the right group rather than based on the strength of one’s argument.

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Your Humanity Isn’t Forgotten

When working with people who have experienced trauma from within religious authoritarian frameworks, one of the most pernicious lies that often becomes very difficult to move beyond, is that their “real” or “authentic” self was tied to the dogma and social group of the believing sect. A way to free oneself from this is to see the underlying lie that supports it: that you’re a singular being for which any deviation makes you deviant. This is fundamentally no different than the declarations being made about AI today.

You haven’t lost your humanity when engaging in new tech, you have instead weighted aspects of it as opposed to others, and by doing so, opened up different avenues of expression. It’s the central point of considering all choices as opportunity costs. The world doesn’t owe you anything. There isn’t some “real you” waiting to be discovered. Every activity shuts down the futures for which a different action would have unveiled. Yes, that can be scary and don’t get me started on the multi-worlds theory of quantum physics, because regardless of if its true, we’re here right now with the threads of our lives being snipped, bounded, and let loose.

Unlike Loki becoming Yggdrasil, the World Tree, we are not at the center of anything, despite the egoistic declarations of centrality that our minds continue to conjure up for us. We are, instead, nodes on a web of biological reality, constantly seeking to extend how we see ourselves and what we may become, through the power of our imagination, centered as it often is, in our technological creations.

Yes, there are threats found in almost any possible thread we pull and follow, but you haven’t at any time left the humanity behind that allows you to weave. Question is: how reflectivey critical are you going to be in the possibilities you do engage in?

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David

Lesson five of deconstruction and healing is all about relational meaning-making. Fundamentally, we are social creatures because that’s exactly how evolution made us as biological animals bound within a naturalistic reality. Rather than being a limitation, this is exactly how we touch upon the infinite. There is simply no end to what can be created when two or more people are gathered together.

This lesson has a couple of worksheets that help you to direct attention towards practical actions of expanding how you see the world and how you connect with others. All of the philosophy will only get you so far. You have to go out and live your life.

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There’s a lot of hubaloo about what AI and its kissing-cousin in the form of chatbots, is doing to us, and while I have a certain reticence, as anyone does when faced with something new, about what the future holds with this new technology, I’m consistently struck by the assumptions people carry that aren’t being questioned. We still operate as if some “core” self is under threat, and that technology, in whatever form, is somehow removing us from who we are “meant to be,” through the evil machinations of capitalism, or whatever other boogeyman people have created by giving agency to labels. I can’t help but wonder when the first neanderthal figured out fire, whether there was a group even then lamenting the loss of their humanity, and gathered in their echo-caves to figure out how to get rid of this scary thing. Sure, fire had a lot of destructive capability, but it also created the glory that is medium-rare steak, so all in all, I think we came out ahead.

The Definition and Nature of Self

The question of what constitutes the self is not an abstract philosophical puzzle reserved for academics, however much I appreciate the ever-growing list of published books on the subject. It is the practical problem every person walks into a therapist’s office carrying, often without knowing it. Who am I when my relationships end? When my religion fails me? When my body changes, my career collapses, or my certainties dissolve? The urgency underneath those questions is the same in each case: there must be something here, some center that persists, and I need to find it to be authentically “me.”

The answer that psychology as a discipline, and most people, has typically defaulted to is the one manifested within dualistic religious traditions, and for individuals, this is true often regardless of whether the person is still a religious believer or not. That answer? The self is a fixed, bounded interior thing. It is a self that exists behind the eyes, a core homunculus, separable from the world around it. This picture carries with it th power of intuition and how people relate to their “lived experience,” but it is more myth than science, and it creates more problems than it solves. If the self is a static container, singular and found in some imagined “core,” then change becomes threat rather than possibility. This is undoubtedly why so many who have left religion, and many others besides, delve into personal therapy to find their “authentic self,” or lament that some ideology kept them from being “true” to who they “really are.” The idea throughout becomes a quest of restoring some pure original state, a personalized Garden of Eden, rather than discovering the flexibility that nature has provided.

A more accurate account begins with the recognition that selfhood is relational and contextual from the start. To paraphrase Daniel Siegel: the mind (or self) is better defined as a process for the regulation of energy and information within our bodies and within our relationships, an emergent process that gives rise to our mental activities such as thinking, emotion, and the memories that provide the structure of who we believe ourselves to be. This, combined with the notion of predictive processing as it relates to cognition, means that each of us is actively constructing the world through which we act and project ourselves into, based on our own idiosyncratic histories.

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The self is not a thing that encounters experience from outside; it is constituted through experience, through the web of relationships, cultural inheritances, embodied sensations, and narrative frameworks we are embedded in from birth. We can use the metaphor of a loom where if someone were to pull a single thread — genetics, childhood attachment, cultural membership — at no point would you have explained the whole person. Instead, you’ve simply isolated one strand from the weave that that the autobiographical self emerges from.

This is why reducing the self to any single variable is always an epistemic failure, and why the diagnostic habit of collapsing a person’s full complexity into a label can result in real harm. What persists through the variable contexts of life is not a fixed thing but much more like an orientation or perspective: values instantiated through behavior, relationships, and commitments that constitute identity through action rather than through some form of essence.

The Theory of Extended Mind

In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published a paper that asked a deceptively simple question: where does the mind stop and the world begin? Their answer was that the boundary is far less fixed than we habitually assume. Cognitive processes are not confined to the skull. When we use a notebook to remember appointments, the notebook is doing genuine cognitive work. When we manipulate physical objects to solve a spatial problem, the environment is part of the process of creating understanding. The mind extends into the world, as we are embedded and embodied within it, through the tools, symbols, and relationships that extend our functioning.

We’ve always been tool-extended creatures. My humor, at least funny to me, at the beginning concerning the discovery of fire, is simply a beginning point example. It’s an example so integral to the picture we have of ourselves as human beings that the myth of Prometheus stands as a testament to when homo sapiens became what it is. Fire as the metaphor for knowledge, and by extension technological development, has always carried within it the duality of destruction and progress. We move forward in our creativity by projecting a critical awareness, and extending our capacity for change and development. Writing extends our memory. Clocks extend our temporal reasoning. Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘cognitive metaphor theory’ is fundamentally based on an extension of a body/mind embedded within nature. Tools do not replace cognitive functioning, they restructure the system as a whole, making new forms of thinking possible that could not have existed without it.

Clark and Chalmers remind us that the boundary between self and world is permeable, negotiated, and functionally defined. A blind person’s cane is not merely a tool they use (most especially if you’re a superhero named Daredevil); after sufficient practice, it becomes part of their perceptual system, transmitting information to them about the world. Cognitive extension is about functional expansion.

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This matters for how we understand the relationship between our contextual selves and the tools we employ. The self, in its many iterations, is not compromised by extension; it is expressed through it. Values do not stay locked inside the person; they propagate outward through behavior, relationships, and the tools we choose to use. The question is never whether extension happens, but whether the means we expand ourselves carries the values and commitments we want to stay connected to, or whether it distorts and displaces them.

AI as a Tool for Expanding What We Already Believe

The diagram above is the argument I’m presenting. AI is simply the latest in a string of tools we’ve developed as a human species. Our AI-expanded capacity is not the most meaningful thing to focus on (though for certain we should have conversations about it). Rather, where the contextual self meets artificial capability, is where we should be more focused on, and it is the area where the assumptions about what we are and how we think have the most consequences. As with any tool, the issue is extended agency. Agency means that that who we are, our human context, remains the author. The tool serves us. It does not replace the author. Though admittedly, as with any tool, we can use it in such a way that the result is our annihilation, as it is with nuclear fission and whether abundant energy is our future or self-destruction through weaponization.

AI systems do not generate beliefs out of thin air and transfer them into users, any more than a hammer forces the person wielding it to do so in a particular way. As anyone who has smashed a finger knows, the tool doesn’t come with an automatic download of instructions.

What AI does is process, organize, synthesize, and articulate the frameworks the person using it brings. This is functionally no different than a conversation with another human being. When a person of intellectual rigor and education uses a language model to explore an idea, what comes back is, hopefully, if the “conversation” was done well, further refined. The self’s orientation and all the variables person brings to the interactive space, directs the process. The tool provides reach, not direction. This is where the ongoing expansion of detecting whether a person uses AI is getting ridiculous. Because it uses good writing principles, like the rule of three, there are people claiming that if they see it being used, the result must have been an AI, regardless of whether the person is an established author and knows what they’r doing.

The contextual self persists. AI extends our capacity, but it doesn’t replace what we’ve brought to the relational space. What can be outsourced is the labor of articulation, the breadth of pattern-matching, the synthesis of researched sources. This is useful, even as it brings with it unique difficulties associated with the tool.

The Limits That a Lack of Self-Critical Awareness Brings

Here is the uncomfortable part of AI extending ourselves: what if you’re an asshole or an idiot, or, to be more kind, varying degrees of ignorant? If the amplification depends entirely on the quality of the beliefs brought to it, there are a lot of really bad and misinformed beliefs. A tool that extends critical inquiry produces insight, at least in theory. A tool that extends the reach of unexamined assumptions, biases, and self-serving narratives feeds the expansion of ignorance to a place where it resists correction precisely because it has started sounding more intelligent.

The ‘fundamental attribution error’ is a bedrock cognitive heuristic or bias where we excuse our own bad choices using external variables while attributing the same behavior in others to fixed internal defects. We rationalize our behavior by constructing narratives that make sense within a world that, through an avoidance of discomfort, we don’t want to question. This is the normal operation of a cognitive system designed to act quickly with incomplete information. The problem is that such a system, left unexamined, generates a self-concept that is largely a manifestation of that other most basic of heuristics or biases: confirmation.

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The self that lacks self-critical awareness does not experience itself as distorted. It experiences itself as simply seeing things clearly. Our values feel obvious rather than chosen, or contextually provided, and our blind spots are by definition invisible. This is the psychological condition in which any tool use, though it would seem particulatly that of AI, perhaps because it mimics agency so much better than a hammer ever will, becomes genuinely dangerous. Cognitive bias scaled up by a large language model does not become less biased; it becomes more persuasive.

There is no built-in process for criticism like there is in scientific disciplines. Self-criticism is possible, but it is a constant choice to engage in, and given our predilection to avoid discomfort, it’s a choice that almost never feels good to pursue. The questioning, the deconstruction of received frameworks, the honest reckoning with one’s motivated reasoning. Without that work, what gets extended by using AI is the illusion of reflection, when truly they are thinking in circles, but more efficiently.

In using AI, we should be cultivating uncertainty as a cognitive virtue rather than a defect to be resolved. We should approach our values and beliefs with the same exploratory spirit one would want to bring to any serious inquiry. This means, to use a frequent phrase in the land of therapy, doing the work, where technological tools serve discovery rather than merely accelerate the defense of what was already assumed.

Let’s get back to the loom (and incidentally why I call my therapeutic and coaching business “Life Weavings”). Each life is a complex interplay of many threads, and to pluck just one will never give you the full picture. The same is true of using AI. The full picture, or at least a fuller one, requires the willingness to look at the whole weave, to notice which threads have been avoided, which ones are tangled, and which ones you have been quietly refusing to examine.

That willingness will not be provided by AI (at least not yet). It is the profound expressive contribution of a self that has chosen, through sustained effort and honest questioning, to remain in relationship with its own uncertainty. To find that a sense of wonder means wading through the discomfort of what isn’t known.

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If you could do any of the above, I’d be very grateful. Readers like you help keep this newsletter going and growing.

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David

Lesson four of deconstruction and healing expands on the ethics and morality we covered previously, seeing how ethics is the bedrock for how we create meaning and purpose in our lives. Just as you were deciding what is good and right as a believer, so now you’re doing the same, and nothing has changed except the realization that the god you thought was real isn’t.

The responsibility rests on you. That’s the message of humanism and a naturalistic ethics. The universe isn’t going to show up for you more than it already has, in providing everything needed to choose the direction of your life, and deal with the consequences of every cost/benefit and opportunity cost that a decision has.

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This is a longer version of a presentation I gave at the Religious Trauma Symposium at Harvard a few weeks ago. The event aimed to shed light on the genuine concerns and experiences that individuals within religious communities, particularly fundamentalist groups, have faced. It also fostered dialogue between academic and clinical communities to explore effective ways of addressing the needs of those who are suffering.

The presentation here is an ongoing development of a paradigm for comprehending the trauma that arises within a religious context, particularly when individuals leave the structure it provides. This is not to mean that trauma doesn’t occur within religious environments, as it most certainly does, and such destabilizing elements further the identified difficulties that lead to and are then heightened when leaving. These difficulties are exacerbated by the degree to which the religious community exhibits control over various areas of a person’s life. That degree of control is, to me, the definitive element that differentiates a religion from a cult.

The development of this paradigm is also not solely connected to trauma that occurs within a religious context. It is an attempt to provide a means of understanding what happens anytime a person’s worldview is threatened and/or undergoing change. Our brains, fundamentally operating as predictive biological machines, are constantly running potential scenarios to manage resources and test reality. Religion simply exists on one end of a spectrum for the disruption that occurs, but it is not the only structure for which disruption happens.

Challenging what we believe is an essential component of an emotionally fulfilling life, and the discomfort that arises from doing so serves as a poignant reminder that our minds are perpetually in need of continuous growth and resilience.

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Lesson three of deconstruction and healing is about that very thing you’re warned about in leaving religion, the thing the authoritarians declare you’ll never find, and will ultimately result in heinous acts of debauchery. Ethics and morality.

While certainly many behaviors you may get up to in your secular life could be and likely are considered acts of debauchery, they are anything but heinous, and you are still very much living a life aligned with your values.

This is a lesson I write about quite often, so I encourage you to read the many articles that exist on values, but when it comes to religious deconversion, values are especially important precisely because the religious think they own them. Spoiler: they do not.

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Lesson two of the journey of deconstruction touches on probably one of the hardest subjects and the most prone to philosophical confusion, the nature of the self. This isn’t a mere dive into Buddhism, as so many atheists end up doing, but a reflection on what it means to be a human being bound within biology and embedded in an evolutionary history. A great many religious ideas are easy to fall into and difficult to get out of precisely because they make a certain intuitive sense from how we feel ourselves to be in the world. Those intuitions are not only false, they contribute to a lot of needless hurt, and get in the way of a journey out of religious ideology.

This lesson contains a couple of articles to go over to hopefully flesh out even further the presentation. Ultimately, you don’t need to understand all the ins and outs of a philosophy of the flesh, but learning to distance yourself from your own thoughts and see yourself as more than one thing can be extraordinarily freeing and is a distinct contrast from the notion of sin that Christianity teaches.

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Lesson one begins our journey by recognizing that whatever god you believed in never existed in the first place. The deity didn’t suddenly disappear when you stopped believing or left your religious identity. Nor did the deity exist when you were a believer.

This seems like a simple point to make, but far too often, people start their process of moving on from religion with the idea that they’re starting from scratch, or starting over, and that everything they thought prior needs to be cleansed or washed away. Which sounds remarkably like the original conversion story so many were sold. Such a framework was nonsense then, and it’s ridiculous now.

Because a deity never existed, the person making all the decisions, deciding what was right and wrong, who to relate to, and how to show up in the daily decisions of every day of a life, was you. Just you. The authority figure(s) you connected to have changed, but not the fact that you were deciding to say yes to them. The incentives that supported different decision-making have changed, but not the fact that it’s you who gives those incentives meaning.

Take back the power that never left you.

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Whether sitting down for coffee, watching a form of media, or engaging in an online discussion, there’s no interaction where the potential of who I become next isn’t being molded. That’s the reality of a connected life, one where a myriad of different variables are all working with varying levels of emotional weight to shape the possibilities of who you and I will become, but also the lens through which we even see those possibilities. My perspective, and every one that each person has, of the world is both inevitable and a limitation. Inevitable because not having a perspective is utterly impossible, and a limitation because I can’t step outside of it. “Taking another’s perspective” has always been a fiction, as you can’t leave your own conscious experience. This is why mind-reading is also a fiction. You can’t leave yourself behind.

This is why experiential flexibility is so important, because there are innumerable other possible lenses for viewing my experiences. The greater number of data for my mind to draw from in shaping possibilities is a net gain for expanding the web of perception. In fact, think of that web being spun by a spider. If the threads only ever intersected at one point, not only is there a single point of failure, but because of that the whole structure is inherently unstable. The more lines that cross, the more nodes are created, and the greater stability that is built.

Every instance of miscommunication is an example pointing towards the inescapable conclusion that we neither can read another’s mind nor step outside of our own projection. Each person exists in our minds as a facsimile of who they are. Hence, humility is important because we never have all the information needed to complete a whole picture. As well, coming back to the web analogy, looking at someone through a single node or intersecting point is a recipe for bigotry, a lack of awareness concerning one’s own biases, and an unstable and limited picture of who that person is.

That inability to fully grasp the whole of another person is why dialogue and writing are important, if not necessary, for one’s own healthy development. Therapists often point to the power of journaling, but the practice is helpful largely because it makes concrete the limitations of our own thought. When we look back at what we’ve written, we should be able to do so with a head-shaking grin at the hubris that existed. The problems we thought were insurmountable eventually became commonplace. The things we found important ended up becoming less so. How we judged ourselves, hopefully, has become different.

This is what, in part, drives me to write and share within this digital world. I could stay within the confines of my immediate surroundings, interact only with work colleagues, friends, and only those who agree with me (extraordinarily limited such a group may be), and yes, each of these visions of our shared world would and are worth exploring, but the digital world has opened up a potential market of perspectives that borders on gluttony. When faced with such a bounty and working within the acknowledgement that vision is an active engagement, exploring different understandings of the world is like going from a flashlight to a lantern in a dark room.

As Jacob Bronowski notes:

"But we are in any case mistaken if we think of our picture of the world as a passive record. The picture is made by, it is made of, our activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the use of the plow and the wheel. It is the implication and the expression, in symbolic form, of all our dealings with nature. The picture is not the look of the world but our way of looking at it: not how the world strikes us but how we construct it. (The Identity of Man)"

Be careful, though, as the enlightened room may not look entirely the way you initially thought it would be when you only had a flashlight. We are not passive recipients of the world we are embedded and embodied in, but co-creatively determining what we each identify as evidence for the opinions we believe are true, and therefore, the shape of things we believe we’re dealing with is equally so. Each public offering of writing is not simply a declaration of my own view; it's a request for and a seeking of continued engagement with the world. It’s a way of yelling into the cave and seeing what the echoes reveal.

If all the potential perspectives of the world were a pie, mine is an infinitesimally small slice, though no less important because of it. Certainly not to me, though of course I almost have to say that, don’t I? This isn't an equality of truth claims, but a recognition of the equality in our inevitable creation of perspective. It’s a major reason why the internet and social media are so enticing, as they’re a technological expansion of what we all feel as biological perspective makers: my view matters.

The drive for perspective making can be curtailed by insularity or expanded through challenging engagement. An honest, though likely uncomfortable, understanding of life, my place in it and as it, and my connection within it grows not in the echo-chamber of my own mind, but in every contact with another degree of perspective.

Again from Bronowski:

"Our experiences do not merely link us to the outside world; they are us, and they are the world for us; they make us part of the world. We get a false picture of the world if we regard it as a set of events that have their own absolute sequence and that we merely watch. (The Identity of Man)"

Whether it be explorations of politics, spirituality, psychology, or the social movements I find fascinating, all is done within a consideration of the active link I have with the shared humanity engaged in the same enterprise. It’s one of the central reasons I left the pursuit of theology and moved into psychology, because the former centered knowledge on a single perspective, and the latter has become an ongoing reminder that we should see the human striving behind every idea, opinion, and exclamation. Sometimes for good. Sometimes for ill. But always the striving remains.

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David

Welcome to module 4 of “Accepting Your Anger.” This is the last module in the class, but that doesn’t mean it’s the last lesson to learn. One of the purposes of how I teach is to base things on principles, so that you can go over them as often as you’d like, and that their application is specific to each person. If I simply told you what to do, not only would that be a level of arrogance I hope I don’t possess, but it wouldn’t be you living your life anymore. Most likely, you came here not wanting anger to take you over anymore, so why would I simply seek to take its place?

In looking at pursuing new behavior, we come to the last part of the path for gaining a better understanding of what emotions are and how they work. By identifying what matters to you, your Values, and exploring the Narratives that structure your life, Behavior becomes the means through which you support both Values and Narratives in a more directed, conscious, and deliberate way.

You don’t get away from consequences, but instead take ownership of what consequences you’re willing to live with.

Previous lessons:

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Welcome to my class on religious trauma, or, more clearly, working through trauma that has occurred within a religious context. I don’t mean to be a smartass with the language, as the difference really is important to me for several reasons, and those reasons separate what I teach in this class from many others who offer help on this topic.

Principles:

1. What makes trauma unique is the person, not the circumstance. This means that each person will construct and live their life differently than others, and because of this, what does or doesn’t get experienced as trauma will be different for each person.

2. Trauma is the result of a combination of context and perception. Context matters because not every difficulty is or should be considered traumatic, and perception matters because many people can be in the same context, like a religious background, and not have those experiences be personally considered as traumatic.

3. How a person reacts to a traumatic experience, what behavior they build to deal with it, are all attempts at one, keeping themselves safe, and two, reorienting themselves in a way that helps them make sense of the world they perceive.

4. Behavioral reactions linked to trauma are, therefore, not a sign of you being broken, damaged, or somehow divorced from your humanity. They are, in fact, signs that you still care about life, your place in it, and are working at figuring out how to move forward in the best way you know how.

5. The function of those behaviors is where healing can begin, precisely because they are attempts at supporting what you still care about, the values that reside at the heart of who you are. The behaviors have consequences you want to move on from, like disconnection from others due to isolation. This doesn’t mean you’ve ceased caring about others, only that there are real concerns about harm to yourself.

6. Your humanity hasn’t been lost, nor was it ever taken from you, no matter what dogma may have said otherwise. You are now, have always been, and will always be, an amazing creature wading through an uncertain unfolding future, seeking, and sometimes yelling for, a space to have meaning and purpose. I hope to join you.

Intro Religious Trauma Class Outline

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The above is a PDF of the slides for the introduction presentation. There are six lessons in total and they are accessible to all paid subscribers. If you have any questions, your paid subscription allows you to engage in posting questions, comments, and seeking support from the community of other subscribers, and I am active in that discussion.

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David French, veteran, lawyer, and opinion writer for various publications, including the New York Times and The Atlantic, wrote an opinion piece, “One Reason the Trump Fever Won’t Break,” in the New York Times on an aspect of Christian Nationalism and how a version of it is being used to shore up support for Donald Trump. I profoundly respect David, and I don’t say that because I’m about to rip into him; I simply love reading everything the man writes. This intellectual devotion and curiosity about his thinking gets me the side-eye from some, particularly in atheistic and humanist circles, since David is a Christian, and I, by all but the most liberal of definitions, am definitely not. Perhaps it’s sharing the same first name, which certainly carries a great history, Biblical and otherwise, but the love of ideas drives me in my reading, and French seems someone of a similar mind.

This is why, in reading his article and the commentary that many have when promoting it, I started shaking my head and thinking back on my own journey of religious faith. I grew up a Christian fundamentalist, believing in the inerrant authority of Biblical scripture, the centrality of faith as an epistemic path for Truth, and ethics derived from the person of Jesus as understood through the epistles and other writings. I was Protestant and Baptist, and later, when attending Grace Bible College (now Grace Christian University), I fell head-over-heels in love with the intellectual theology of mid-Acts dispensationalism and swam around in the muddy waters of the King-James-only framing concerning Bible translations. Those are topics for another time, and I mention them only for those who want to go down theological rabbit holes in their internet sleuthing.

Suffice to say, considering Christianity through the lens of intellectual rigor was how I largely considered my faith and, ironically, provided the prompting that led me to leave it all behind. Regardless, there was a tension that existed then, as it continues today in different forms, between the intellectual ponderings of believers and the fervency of considering faith as an epistemic straight arrow to the Truth bullseye. The emotion-first tool of faith has long been used as a post hoc tool for rationalization, just as there exists a number of secular variants, all of which boil down to how ideas serve as more than just declarations of how the world works, but often more so as directing social attention to the group the person belongs to.

The Psychological Roots of National Identity

That tension was a constant source of emotional turmoil (though admittedly, this may be overstating it) for me, feeling at once the pull to see my form of faith as superior while also feeling profoundly left out of larger conversations and social experiences. All of which brings me to this line from the article:

We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy. In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump. (David French)

“We” here is an interesting identifier because who is the “we” that is being referred to? Certainly not the majority of Christian believers who, as even French notes later, have little knowledge of the various theological systems and philosophies that undergird apocalyptic literature and prophetic scriptural analysis. My own anecdotal life experience supports this, as I was always at pains when talking with fellow believers who would much rather read the puerile writings of Max Lucado than get into discussions of Dispensational or Covenant theological systems, or ponder the epistemic concerns of presuppositionalism. Discussions of faith as a “relationship” were the lynchpin pulling at the foundations of any capacity for social bonding. Hence, the “we” that French belongs to immediately struck me even as I smiled and sighed in memory.

It is a proper grokking of the “relationship” language that is missed in the ongoing analysis opinion. Christian Nationalism is considered, particularly in its rhetoric, as “unhinged,” and the conclusion is to consider it as “not serious, but it’s very dangerous.”

No, it’s very serious, AND it’s very dangerous. Spending so much time in the social halls of intellectual exploration and not enough time with the masses is where such a conclusion misses the centrality of humanity and leads to French being shocked when confronted by a friend saying they agreed until the Holy Spirit told him Trump was anointed to lead. I get that the “seriousness” is more about noting nationalism’s lack of intellectual rigor, but describing it that way only buries the real seriousness of the matter.

From Idolatry to Inclusion: Reconciling Religious Values with Patriotism

There is a not-small segment of the population for whom democracy, the rule of law, and social norms are to be cast aside, and the usage of ends-justified violence is increasingly seen as a moral imperative. That is most definitely serious and resting on a, and here is where French’s personal theology is less conservative and sin-focused, simple acknowledgment of the U.S. populace’s increasing secularization, is failing again to miss how humanity is driven not by Truth but by “relationship.”

It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. (David French)

Yes, it will, but that’s what nationalism has always been about. The only thing that changes is the substance of the paper-thin intellectual veil being pulled over when the activists want to appear as adults even as they’re surrounded by the dumpster fire of their childish actions.

What French and others fail to grasp when looking at the social movement of their own faith tradition is how the roots of the problem are found in that same milieu. It is just as real, and certainly is felt by the masses as more real, as the intellectual version that ponders issues of “virtue in the public square” and the “balance of order and liberty.” Critical reflective reason will always be a road less traveled because it takes effort, and faith frankly takes none at all.

The reality is that Christianity, like any religion or ideology that rests on a dualism of mind/matter, intellect/emotion, and science/faith, will, when adherents are faced with perceived uncertainty in one’s social power and future resource accrual, side with the ego-enhancing power of rationalization in service of the tribe. The tribe serves as a bulwark against the present, in service of an imagined future that only they see and only they can bring about. As Hebrews 11:1 states, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The “hoped for” and “not seen” point to a future that hasn’t happened yet, where fantasies take root, and everything can be justified to achieve a desired end because the consequences are not felt there, only the effects of having done what is “right.”

This is where statements like those recently made by the bad orange man on what is supposedly the holiest day for Christians, that of Easter, filled with cursing and calls for war crimes, will not result in almost anyone questioning their previously given allegiance. Ethics is not a general set of principles for those who think of tribe first, but a means of declaring solidarity with one another. The worse the things that dear-leader says serve as a way to rub the chaff from the believing few. Who but the most committed would be willing to set aside any personal misgivings in the service of the supposed greater good? Every heinous thing defended serves as a way to declare their loyalty and become even more secure within the in-group.

For those like French, who see reflective humility as a good, blind allegiance will never sit right. Unfortunately, in a world seemingly continuing on a path of an uncertain future, blind allegiance never felt so good.

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3. Upgrade to Paid: A paid subscription gets you:

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David

Welcome to module 3 of “Accepting Your Anger” class. Here we look at relationships and how they are bedrock of how we live out our values and narratives. We simply do not exist as human beings without in some way being within various relationship forms or connections. The question is never whether you’re in a relationship, but what kind, with whom, and how much attention are you giving to it.

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Claiming things are “toxic” is quite often a way to avoid acknowledging the functional purpose of the underlying behavior or space. A workplace may be “toxic” even as many of the protocols in place are there to address demands upon it. A relationship may be “toxic” even as needs are continuing to be met. Let’s be clear, this isn’t a declaration to stay within a situation that is destructive or dangerous to you. What we’re after is to see how toxicity is a descriptive after the fact. It is quite possible to appreciate the outcome of a thing even as the means by which it is generated is deemed awful. People often complain about the so-called toxic workplaces like Amazon and other tech firms, or lament the use of child labor, and yet are quite happy for that two-day delivery service and gleefully go down the consumerist hole that is Temu. I’ve worked with many couples over the years in relationships where the term “toxic” gets thrown around, and yet they don’t want to give up the niceties afforded by excessive work hours, even as they yell about the emotional neglect by the spouse who is engaged in providing them.

Much the same is going on when it comes to anger, and it’s supposed “toxicity” or, in softer language, being labeled as a “negative” emotion. We treat it like a radioactive spill in the living room of the psyche, something to be contained, neutralized, or scrubbed away as quickly as possible. We label anger a “secondary emotion,” a “character flaw,” or a “symptom of trauma.” The truth is: There is no such thing as toxic anger, and emotions are not in themselves positive or negative.

When we label an emotion as “toxic,” we aren’t just describing a feeling; we are engaging in a narrative act. We are telling ourselves a story that says certain parts of our human experience are inherently broken. I often write and present about how narratives direct the behavioral expressions of our emotional reactions. If a certain story is that your anger is a “toxin,” your response will be an avoidance strategy of suppression, shame, and fear. Further, since feelings are not anything that you had any control over in their initial emergence, labeling one or another toxic or negative is to declare that some intrinsic part of yourself is such.

The challenge here is to look through the lenses of George A. Kelly’s Psychological Constructivist Theory (PCT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and by doing so, you can find a far more empowering reality.

The Scientist in the Storm: George A. Kelly’s View

George A. Kelly famously suggested that every human being is, in their own way, a scientist. We are constantly making hypotheses in the form of psychological constructs, organizing our behavior as instruments of testing our understanding of the world we believe we exist in. We don’t just “have” personalities; we build “construct systems,” internal models of how the world works, so we can predict and navigate our lives through the behavior we believe is available for us to engage in. From this perspective, an emotion isn’t a “thing” that happens to you; it’s a signal about how well your “experiments” in living are going.

In Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology (PCP), anger is defined as the effort to maintain conditions that we believe “ought to exist.” Think about that. Anger is the sound of your internal narrative system insisting on its own validity. For many, confirmation bias is something to avoid, but psychologically, the confirmation heuristic is a cognitive means of establishing continuity in one’s projections. When you get angry because someone lied to you, your “scientist” is observing data that contradicts your theory that “people I trust should be honest.” Your anger is a vigorous attempt to keep that theory intact. It is a protective, self-validating response.

The problem arises not from the anger itself, but from what Kelly called hostility. In the PCP framework, hostility is the “continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” Anger says, “This shouldn’t be happening!” Hostility says, “I will break you until you admit I’m right, even though the evidence shows I’m wrong.” In both reactions, we are responding to a perceived threat.

Threat was defined by Kelly as an awareness that a comprehensive change was imminent in your core constructs and, therefore, in your conception of yourself. In the broadest sense, threat can be induced when we perceive any plausible alternative to our core constructs. A comprehensive change in one’s core constructs is what occurs during an “identity crisis,” when one’s conception of oneself is shaken and needs to be re-construed. (David Lester, “Emotions in Personal Construct Theory”)

When we call anger “toxic,” we are usually looking at the hostile behaviors people use to avoid the pain of being wrong. But by labeling the feeling as the problem, we miss the data the feeling is providing. Anger is a signal that your construct system is under pressure, that how you desire the world to be is under threat, or has already been thwarted. Anger is, rather than something to avoid, an invitation to look at your “theories” about the world and decide if they need an update. It isn’t a poison; it’s a challenge to review how you see yourself and the world within which you interact.

The Trap of “Toxic” Labels: An ACT Perspective

This is where the principles and practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provide a necessary bridge to healthier living. In ACT, we talk about cognitive fusion, getting so caught up in our thoughts and feelings that we think they are the literal truth. When you feel anger and experience it as an expression of who you are, your mind starts spinning a story: “I am an angry person,” or “This person is destroying me.” This is where emotions are eminently reasonable, and the dichotomy of reason and emotion is false (a point Kelly was often at pains to point out). The emotion is a recognition, a declaration, that the construct through which one interacts within the world is under threat, that they are under threat. Reason and emotion are simply two ways of expressing the symbiosis of personal experience.

However, the seamlessness with which our experience seems to be derived from us leads to that fusion and a reduction in nuanced appreciation for varied ways of looking at a situation. By adding the label “toxic” to that anger, you have created a second layer of fusion. Now you aren’t just angry; you are “toxically angry.” You’ve turned a temporary biological and psychological state into a permanent, shameful identity.

ACT teaches us that no internal experience is inherently “bad” or “good.” Instead, we ask: Is this workable? The question is about function. Does acting on this feeling move me toward the person I want to be and in the service of the values I hold dear?

When we stop fighting the anger—when we practice acceptance—we aren’t saying the anger is pleasant. We are simply acknowledging that it is there. By making room for the anger, by defusing from seeing it as an identity, we stop the seemingly inevitable process of behavior turning destructive. The toxicity isn’t in the anger; it’s in the struggle against the anger as we lose sight of what it’s pointing us to, and get hooked into making the world “right” through any means necessary. Consider how the more you try to push a beach ball under the water, the more violently it pops up and hits you in the face.

Anger as a Value-Pointer

If you look closely at your anger through the lens of constructs under threat, you’ll find that it is almost always pointing toward something you value. You don’t get angry about things you don’t care about.

If you are angry about an injustice at work, it’s because you value fairness. If you are angry at a partner’s neglect, it’s because you value connection and reliability. Anger is the “bodyguard” or “shield” of your values. When we pathologize it as “toxic,” we end up pathologizing the very values the anger is trying to protect.

In my class on Accepting Your Anger, I challenge people to stop asking “How do I stop being angry?” and start asking “What is this anger protecting?” When you identify the value beneath the intensity, you gain the self-empowerment to flexibly choose your response. You can move from reaction (hostility) to action (living your values).

Deconstructing the “Fragile” Narrative

One of the most damaging trends in modern therapy is the suggestion that we are fragile, that “negative” emotions like anger are trauma-induced glitches that require constant “regulation” or “healing.” This narrative makes us victims of our own biology.

Constructivism tells us we are not fragile; we are active. We are the authors of our own meanings. If you feel anger, it isn’t because you are “broken” or “dysregulated.” It’s because you are a meaning-making machine within a world that doesn’t always fit your blueprints.

By refusing the label of “toxic anger,” you reclaim your agency. You recognize that you have the capacity to hold intense, difficult feelings without being consumed by them. You learn that you can be angry and kind; angry and effective; angry and centered in your values.

The Way Forward

So, how do we live with an emotion that the world insists is dangerous?

1. Notice the Narrative: The next time anger rises, notice the labels your mind wants to attach to it. Is it calling the anger “toxic”? Is it telling you that you’re “losing control”? Recognize these as stories, not facts.

2. Validate the Construct: Ask yourself: What “ought to be” happening right now that isn’t? What theory about the world is being challenged? (e.g., “I expected to be respected, and I’m not.”)

3. Check for Hostility: Are you trying to “extort evidence” to prove you’re right, even if the situation has changed? Are you trying to force reality to fit your old construct? This is where the damage happens.

4. Pivot to Values: If this anger is a bodyguard, what is it guarding? Fairness? Safety? Excellence? Once you find the value, ask: “What is the most workable way to honor this value right now?”

Anger is part of the “Humanity” in Humanity’s Values. It is a fierce, vital, and necessary part of the human experience. It is the fuel for change, the signal of injustice, and the guardian of our boundaries. It isn’t a poison, and it isn’t a disease.

It’s time we stopped trying to “cure” our anger and started learning to listen to it. You aren’t toxic. You’re simply human, and your anger is proof that you still believe you have something worth fighting for. Reach out and embrace the value.

This is module 2 of the “Accepting Your Anger” class. Here we look at that overly popular term “narrative.” Here, narratives are not ways of determining truth so much as frameworks that give us our lived experiences. They are the structure through which we identify what values are defined us and how we determine what they look like in practice.

If you’ve ever wondered why some things upset you more than others and/or why you get angry at certain times and not at others, the boundaries provided by your stories/narratives are the answer. If you’ve wondered why some people, including yourself, can be “hypocrites,” where caring about one thing seems to mean not caring about another, narratives are what allows this to happen.

We are not so much finding truths in our lives, as starting from what we believe and seeking consistency in applying those beliefs. If that means we ignore some things, or emphasize other things, then so be it.

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This is module 1 of “Accepting Your Anger,” focusing on the nature of emotional triggers, seeing them through a behavioral and ACT lens. Rather than viewing triggers as something that happens to you, we can see them as being expressions of concern and the identification of value, or what matters to you.

Anger isn’t a problem. It is not anything to be ashamed of. Rather, anger is acknowledgment that you still care about the things that matter to you, and that is a very good thing.

What you do with that anger, whether you serve it, or the value(s) that it points you to, that’s where the work begins.

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“It’s really difficult to be a therapist these days” is the message in social media posts of self-declared socially-minded mental health workers. This pervasive message has, of course, a reciprocal effect on the nature of what therapy ends up being in practice, where the assumptions brought in by mental health workers and the questions posed, iteratively teach clients and patients the “proper” lens through which they should assess their lives. As behavioral research has repeatedly shown, what you attend to is what you reinforce in your life. This is not incidental: I find it frustrating when therapists and parents declare that a client or child is “spontaneously” and by their own will expressing interest in a particular thing or focusing on a particular behavior. Each will forget the questions they asked about and the attention they gave to those specific interests and behaviors.

This focus on attention is not some reiteration of the magical thinking of “The Secret,” that early 2000’s book which elevated thought to a realm of causal power upon the universe. Rather, this is an appreciation for how attention, likely one of the most powerful, if not central, of the cognitive mechanisms in our lives, directs the use of our limited resources, namely time, but also by extension finances and social capital.

What you pay attention to, what you spend your limited cognitive space contemplating, has an innate opportunity cost. This is true of all behavior, but where it’s at least nominally easy to identify how engaging in a particular bodily activity means you can’t then do another one at the same time, people tend not to view mental activity in the same way. Thing is, mental activity is still, well, activity. You can’t have more than one conscious thought at the same time. And insofar as consciousness has a role in our lives, consider it as a second step, establishing the direction of your immediate life. The first step is not anything you have much direct control over, that of your unconscious or pre-conscious processes. There isn’t much to it in providing a definitive answer to what you’re going to do next with your behavior; it’s simply too fluid to establish a concrete direction. Once the internal activity manifests in consciousness, there are still a lot of directions you can go, but they’ve become a lot fewer.

Unfortunately, because consciousness is so central to our lives, and frankly, the case could be made that it really is the only thing we ever actually do experience, we take it for granted even as we also give it entirely too much power. We take it for granted by not appreciating the opportunity cost that each thought has, and, especially, what the level of cost is when we preoccupy ourselves with particular thoughts. There were several ways to express that last sentence, but I like the word “preoccupy” because that is what we are often blindly doing with our attention, front-loading the occupation of our mind, pre-selecting how we are going to spend our time, and therefore cutting ourselves off from the myriad of other possibilities that exist.

This is where we give our thoughts entirely too much power. Just because our thoughts are occupied by something and qualify as a behavior, it does not mean doing so is an action possessed of automatic or inevitable moral inertia. In other words, your thoughts are not nearly as important or powerful as their presence may trick you into believing. Consider that each and every day, there are thousands, if not millions, of thoughts that you have zero recollection of. Further, a sizeable majority of those thoughts contribute almost nothing to the physical expression of your life. There are thoughts you can have right now, just like many others you have every day, that not only do not connect to an expressive behavior, but are even the opposite. One of the favorite personal experiments in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to do is to have the thought, and even express it out loud, that “I am not raising my arm” even as you do in fact raise your arm.

Yet, despite this lived experience highlighting the limitation and powerlessness of our thinking, we still seem determined to believe that some thoughts are somehow special or unique from any others. Spoiler: they are not. Thoughts are always just thoughts, and nothing makes one or another more intrinsically meaningful than any other. In fact, and here’s the icing on the cake of recognizing that thoughts aren’t important merely by their existence, is how the significance of any of them is determined far more by the environmental context within which they arise.

Experiment with me. How often do you think about food and not reach for a sample? Given the biological need we all have for calories, and how often advertisements are centered on food, it’s a fair guess that the percentage of times you have a thought about food and do not engage in eating is extraordinarily small. You can do this with several things, from seemingly random thoughts of violence, cursing, and imaginings of violating social norms, of which you do not express outwardly, to the sadder example of the many times you think about how much you love the people in your life and consider acting on it, but don’t. The threshold for when a thought leads to an action is not based on the thought itself, but the context, including the immediacy of access where it concerns food, and the perceived reception of our actions by those we care about. Here again, your thoughts are not the linchpin to release an action, but the ride-along for environmental opportunity.

However, because we often ignore context and place the locus of control upon our thoughts, this leads to a situation ripe for manipulation. Advertisers, department store organizers, theme park developers, and entertainment streamers all love the fact that we hubristically believe our thoughts to be under our immediate and total control, and by extension, our actions, to be a matter of deliberate choice. It frees them up to manipulate us, often utilizing the same technique, albeit expressed in different ways: the intense fluctuation of high-intensity emotional experiences, particularly from aversive to affirmative, or anger to joy.

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Nowhere is this more prevalent than in news coverage of politics and related social issues, with the result being the exact opposite of good for you. As Arthur Brooks notes in a recent article, “Face It, You’re Addicted to Politics:”

This manipulation is effective but horrible for your mental health—especially if it becomes a semi-permanent feature of your life, because emotional instability (not negative emotion per se) drives neuroticism. Psychologists have shown in multiple studies that variability in mood predicts clinical depression even better than consistent emotional negativity. One hypothesis to explain this finding is that frequent ups and downs, especially for people prone to depression, dysregulate the amygdala, a crucial part of your brain’s limbic system that regulates emotional processing, in a way that biases a person to overreact to negative stimuli and underreact to positive ones. (Arthur Brooks)

This brings us back to the beginning of this article, where the therapist laments having to do their job, forgetting that what they bring to their job is at least as important, if not more so, given the power dynamics at play in the “professional” relationship, than what the client does. Therapists are not passive recipients of their clients’ lives, but cocreators of the therapeutic space. What they attend to contributes to, in part, what the client will believe is important to focus on. Encouraging themselves in the constant inculcation of political news and framing every individual life as somehow being directly affected by broader national issues supports a mentality of thought-centric living. When therapists should encourage a healthier practice of holding thoughts lightly, they instead reinforce the erroneous notion that thinking is the most crucial activity we engage in daily, and thoughts are somehow sacred, particularly when they pertain to socially significant concerns.

This thought-centric living is enlarged through the emotional heroin that is social media, where not only is every thought encouraged to be expressed, no matter how ill-informed or ridiculous, but ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and comments, often equally if not more ill-informed and ridiculous, are seen as engagement. While I do not subscribe to the notion that “Twitter (or insert other social media platform) is not real life,” the equivocation of engagement, where throwing thoughts into a digital landscape is often seen as similar in effect to volunteering, community involvement, and actual voting, is not only destructive to democracy, it reinforces the false notion that thoughts themselves are somehow affecting the world.

Such magical thinking fuels the rapid pace at which people doomscroll and consume increasingly substantial amounts of political news and commentary. Again from Brooks’s article:

In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.

Read that last part again: “30 percentage points above the next highest are of news interest.” Let’s come back to opportunity cost and the limitation of our resources, and consider now how people are ignoring sizeable sections of their lives. If such consumption was leading to more behavioral engagement, like voting, and being more informed about local and state government, there could be a case made for such an outsized percentage. However, as polling done by Johns Hopkins indicates:

“Almost half of those surveyed couldn't say what their state spent the most on; even fewer knew which state issues were most controversial. Fewer than 20 percent could name their state legislators. A third couldn't name their governor.”

And where it concerns voting, the only direct influence people have in a representative democracy, according to Pew Research:

The 66% turnout rate in 2020 was the highest since 1908, and 2024’s rate of 64% was the second highest, tied with 1960.

Little wonder people can’t name their governor or who represents them in Congress, as so few people are actually having to fill in the bubbles next to those names.

If news consumption isn’t leading to greater behavioral involvement or in being informed about the actual government, then what is it doing?

Reading that tenth article on the war in Iran isn’t going to change anything in the world. Watching video after video of ICE agents being belligerent is not going to make them stop. And no, “being informed” is not what’s actually going on, since if that were the case, such would have been addressed at the first, if not at least by the second video or article, given how so many of them are just repeating the same talking points and behavior. “Being informed” is the modern equivalent of clapping to give a fairy its wings.

A reminder that opportunity costs are an inevitable calculation we make through our behavior. How much are you missing in your life because of constantly feeding the outrage machine?

Put down the phone. Disengage from social media (and yes, I recognize the irony of writing this on Substack). Bring your attention to your loved ones and express how much they mean to you. Volunteer with your charitable organizations. Organize community activities. Contribute to your local stores and artisans.

The problems of the world are not going to go away because of your rage and digital posts. By being more engaged in actual living, rather than mental incantations, you’ll not only find yourself living a better life, but you’ll also find yourself more capable when the chips are down to do what is necessary to support the change you want to see.

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This is an introduction to the Accepting Your Anger class that I’ve developed. Serving as an introduction to the class, this presentation covers an outline, some basic principles that will be used, and what to look forward to.

This class, among others, and ongoing presentations, will be exclusively for paying subscribers. All other material will continue to be freely available. As well, the broader community comments and discussion will also be included for paying subscribers to encourage sharing resources and discussion about the material. I will certainly be popping in to contribute to the discussion.

I hope you enjoy the class, and each week for four weeks will be a new module/presentation for this class, followed by other topics.

In this course, you’ll connect with your anger in a way that is more focused on acceptance than management.

I’ll help you become more aware of why you get angry, appreciate the nature of anger and its use in our lives, and develop skills to create a greater gap between feeling and action so you can express yourself in better, less destructive ways.

You’ll learn to be a better you, not only for yourself but for those you care about.